Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication over mobile and wireless networks is expected to become increasingly important in the future. An existing industry vision of 50 billion connections in 2020will to a large extent rely on M2M devices (since the human population in 2020 is expected to be around 8billion). Examples of possible M2M applications are almost countless. Examples include M2M devices:                in private cars for communicating service needs, the car's position (retrieved using GPS) as well as receiving up-to-date traffic data for traffic guidance systems        in water or electricity meters for remote control and/or remote meter reading        in street-side vending machines for communicating when good are out-of-stock or when enough coins are present to justify a visit for emptying        in taxi cars for validating credit cards        in delivery cars for fleet management including optimization of delivery routes and confirming deliveries        in ambulances for sending life-critical medicine data to the hospital prior to arriving in order to increase chances of successful treatments        in surveillance cameras for home or corporate security purposes        
Some of these applications rely on mobility support, while others are located at fixed geographical locations without the need for mobility support.
M2M applications will typically rely on IP communication, meaning that the applications as such are transparent to the mobile network. What is needed is the ability to carry IP traffic from A to B, i.e. between the M2M device and a centrally located application server.
Solutions exist for how to assign security-related parameters to the terminals in a light-weight fashion (without requiring SIM cards or Soft SIMs). One solution can be found in WO 2009/002236 A1, “A Method and Apparatus for Enabling Connectivity in a Communication Network”, which could be one, but not the only, way of solving the security requirements.
The problem with the existing solutions is that mobile networks are not designed to differentiate between different types of terminals. Each M2M device need to individually attach to the network and receive an IP address. This not only consumes large number of IP addresses which in the case of IPv4 is very scarce, but also put an increased signaling load on the network since a large number of devices will attach over the air (increasing startup time), as well as consume resources in the network (memory, CPU) related to the IP session itself. Current mobile network standards do not allow for flexibility in terms of light-weight vs. normal sessions.